I spent some time last year in a tax haven. The legions of immigrant lawyers who have tacked up a shingle there were all up in arms that the Brits were going to force them to abide by US backed law to disclose company ownership. But they were quite happy with the senior English Chief Justice the Brits sent them to preside over their civil courts who will never make them actually have to do such disclosures.

So there is all this talk about Putin's Inner Circle, The Chinese President, Assad's family, The PM of Iceland etc. etc.

And as you mentioned: "Where is the Free Press?" What American paper or news site is talking about the 400 wealthy Americans listed in the Panama Papers?

ZIP. NADA. Not one paper. I can predict that dollars to donuts you will find at least 2 current presidential candidates listed, and past administrations as well, along with the supposed cool elite of Silicon Valley fame etc.

Not one lapdog of the press is going to bite the hand of their Oligarchical Masters.

Western corporate media once again hand picked leaks that serve the 1% as Noam Chomsky has revealed throughout his career. In this article blogger and whistleblower, Craig Murray, confirms Chomsky's thesis which he and Edward S. Herman developed in Manufacturing Consent in 1988.

"Unfortunately the leaker has made the dreadful mistake of turning to the western corporate media to publicise the results. In consequence the first major story, published today by the Guardian, is all about Vladimir Putin and a cellist on the fiddle. As it happens I believe the story and have no doubt Putin is bent."But why focus on Russia? Russian wealth is only a tiny minority of the money hidden away with the aid of Mossack Fonseca. In fact, it soon becomes obvious that the selective reporting is going to stink.""What do you expect? The leak is being managed by the grandly but laughably named “International Consortium of Investigative Journalists”, which is funded and organised entirely by the USA’s Center for Public Integrity. Their funders include

among many others. Do not expect a genuine expose of western capitalism. The dirty secrets of western corporations will remain unpublished""The corporate media – the Guardian and BBC in the UK – have exclusive access to the database which you and I cannot see. They are protecting themselves from even seeing western corporations’ sensitive information by only looking at those documents which are brought up by specific searches such as UN sanctions busters. Never forget the Guardian smashed its copies of the Snowden files on the instruction of MI6.

What if they did Mossack Fonseca database searches on the owners of all the corporate media and their companies, and all the editors and senior corporate media journalists? What if they did Mossack Fonseca searches on all the most senior people at the BBC? What if they did Mossack Fonseca searches on every donor to the Center for Public Integrity and their companies?"

JetRx wrote:

Not a peep from the Corporate-Owned-Main-Stream-Media about 400+ Americans allegedly linked to these "accounts". One must wonder...

I noticed.But as I've observed elsewhere, the so-called MSM becomes more obsolete by the day. In spite of all efforts to suppress the Internet it continues to grow in power. Word of this story has spread wide today--maybe more slowly than you'd expect if the TV news were working the story as they should, but spreading wide nonetheless.

As of brunchtime CST, this story has burst and splattered like a rotten pumpkin on the world's front porch. Going to be interesting--how small a fraction of the world's Brahmins who ought to resign their positions will actually resign (actual repercussions like prison time being out of the question)?

George Orr wrote:

As of brunchtime CST, this story has burst and splattered like a rotten pumpkin on the world's front porch. Going to be interesting--how small a fraction of the world's Brahmins who ought to resign their positions will actually resign (actual repercussions like prison time being out of the question)?

I hate to say it, but I think there is at least one candidate who is going to have to start wearing a Kevlar® suit unless the DNC manages to put an end to his run for office:

Robert Miracle of Bellevue, Wash., is in the files. He was indicted for a $65-million Seattle-area Ponzi scheme involving investment in Indonesian oilfields, with new investors’ money allegedly used to pay off past investors. Miracle was sentenced on May 13, 2011, to 13 years in prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud and tax evasion.

Miracle’s company was called Mcube Petroleum, and it remained an active shareholder in several offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands up until he pleaded guilty. The offshores were created by Mossack Fonseca.

Benjamin Wey is a U.S. citizen and president of New York Global Group. He was indicted last year, along with his Swiss banker, Seref Dogan Erbek, on securities fraud charges. Wey’s alleged scheme to conceal a true ownership interest in publicly traded companies was at the heart of the charges. Wey is accused of using offshores set up with Mossack Fonseca to disguise complicated transactions between Chinese operating companies and publicly traded U.S. shell companies.

The two “are believed to have profited in the tens of millions, while victim shareholders were left holding the bill,” Diego Rodriguez, an FBI official involved in the case, said in a statement at the time of indictment.

Florida billionaire Igor Olenicoff, a commercial real estate mogul, appears in the data as a shareholder of Olen Oil Management Limited. He raised a national stir in 2007 after being sentenced to just two years of probation for tax evasion. He paid a $52 million fine after not declaring more than $200 million in offshore shell companies. More recently, he was found guilty in 2014 for making replicas of a pricey sculpture and was ordered to make restitution to the sculptors whose work he had copied.

There’s Anthony J. Gumbiner, the Dallas-area chairman of Hallwood Group Inc. He’s a British national with deep Texas ties who settled an insider trading case in 1996 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, paying $1.7 million in penalties at the time.

A jetsetter in the 1980s, Gumbiner was known for his lavish lifestyle in Monte Carlo. More recently, he’s been tied up in litigation over oilfield investments. His Hallwood Energy filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2009.

It wasn’t until 2015 that the law firm seemed to catch on to Gumbiner’s legal problems and started to conduct enhanced background checks. By then his offshore companies had been inactive since 2011.

And there’s John Michael “Red” Crim, author of the self-published books “From Here to Malta,” and “I’ve Been Arrested, Now What?”

Federal jurors in Philadelphia in January 2008 convicted Crim and two associates in a plot to have investors use phony trusts to cheat the IRS out of roughly $10 million in tax revenue.

In an interview with McClatchy's project partner Fusion, at a halfway house in Los Angeles last February, Crim described how he brought business to Mossack Fonseca and other registered corporate agents.

"My responsibility is to set-up the documentation, hand it over to the client, and now they're in business," Crim said. "I don't even know sometimes what that business is about, and I didn't want to spend all my time investigating what they're doing. I mean, some of (them) just flat out would tell you it was none of your business."

In a separate case, federal authorities were unaware that a defendant in a fraud case had an offshore account with Mossack Fonseca. Internet phone company executive Jonathan Kaplan pleaded guilty in Bridgeport, Conn., in 2007 to accepting more than $400,000 in a commercial bribery scheme.

Kaplan received probation. A law enforcement source, speaking on condition of anonymity because of pending legal matters, confirmed that prosecutors did not know that Kaplan had established an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands in 2004 called SGA Wireless. It remained active until May 2010.

Reached by phone in New Jersey, Kaplan was asked whether he told authorities about SGA Wireless. He stammered, “I’m going to have to decline. I’ll talk to you.” He then abruptly hung up.

"Low hanging fruit" w/past legal "issues".

Not sure if "scumbag" is the appropriate label. APRIL 15 is looming. I could be susceptable to bias.